SQL Server 2005 SP3 + SQL Fest

First of all thanks for all the visitors who have been patiently visiting my pages even though they have not been update for a while. Things were really hectic all these days. But the real reason would be obviously my lazyness and my learning curve has gone negative now a days :(.. Any have I need to kick off my learning curve hopefully will keep this blog updated.

Atlast the long awaited SP3 has been released. It was in CTP for a while and now it has been released to public. It can be downloaded from the following link. Click here to download

Recently attended the SQL Fest conference it was nice to share the thoughts with the sql development team. They have promised that they will try to conduct this event atleast once in a 6 months. They have also extended the venues from Hyd, Bangalore to Chennai and Delhi. You can get details about this at sqlcommunity.com or sqlfest.com

Critical Hot Fix on SP2

The earlier release on SP2 had a maintenance plan bug (if you have downloaded the SP2 before March 5th), which did an early delete of the backup files, then MS released a hot fix then later on seems like they have found out another bug, which prevents from the maintenance plans to execute the checkdb. They have released another hot fix (It is supposed to be of a critical hot fix type.). The details of this can be read from .
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I am thinking that MS is a bit hassle in all the releases of this SQL 2005 and that too with the SP2 release its not even couple of months they have released back to back hot fixes on this SP2. Now Im a bit scared to apply SP2 in my servers, since SP2 has no come back once we apply it.

What Do I love in SP2

Microsoft has atlast released its SP2, it has been awaited for so long and it went through a long testing cycle. The CTP was relased some where during mid of October. Lets see what is there in SP2, Now a days the trend as become such that they started releasing enhancements in service packs rather fixes. As you all know SP1 got mirroring similarly SP2 has tons of new features. I just give some of the features that I love it in SP2.

1. Maintenance Plan - The best thing in this and I love it. Now the plans look like our old 2000 ones, we can have multiple schedulers and bye bye to the shit of creating each plan to each job. The only glitch here is in the wizard we have only one maintenance clean up task, so we need to edit it to add the clean up task of the transaction logs :((.

2. There is no need to install business intelligent studio to edit/create the maintenance task hurrahhhhhhh!!!

3. The next best think I love is the reports oh man they are wow... now you can open them in their own window and the best thing is you can add custom reports in side your management studio. Come on guys its time to rock and role and build custom reports :).

4. Mann this feature you all will love it oohh earlier if you are generating scripts, you need to run the boring wizard twice if at all you need to create a script to create object and then drop object. Guess what now it has been changed you can generate scripts for both at the same time. Itsnt good guys you rock.

5. The another thing i have noticed is earlier when you run the sp_helpfile sp on a sql 2000 database, the result will come along with tons of spaces, I noticed it till sp1 but recently after installing sp2 i noticed that the spaces have goneeeeeeee. I surely give a wowooo to SP2 team for this. Its saves me from the pain of removing the unwanted spaces.

Word of Caution : Once SP2 is applied there is no come back path. You need to remove the whole instance and then do a fresh installation to remove the SP2, which is the biggest nah from me. While SQL 2005 was released the MS assured that there it will be easy to remove the service packs but not this time :((. I wouldnt dare to install it in my production. Just install the tools guys and have fun with them and wait for the screams of ohhh this broke this to settle down and then we can install it in our production.

You can read abt the features of SP2 here . you can download the SP2 here . The guys who developed/manage SQL Server blog here just in case if you guys need to give a howl at them :).